‘Daredevil’ Recap, Season 2, Episode 3: Malice in Chains

“New York’s Finest,” the third episode of Daredevil’s second season, has a lot going on. Foggy Nelson does some fine lawyering in the middle of an emergency-room knife fight. Karen Page does equally impressive work winning an assistant district attorney over to their side, and is rewarded with a weirdly Edward Hopper-esque shot of herself immersed in photos of the fallen.

Rosario Dawson’s Claire Temple shows up again, as strong a performance as you’re likely to see in a role this slight. There’s an enormously long and involved hallway/stairwell fight scene that rivals the first season’s similar setup in intensity and choreography—and this one involves both a vertical and horizontal axis of action, plus chains!

But the highlight was just two dudes talking — and one thing I didn’t see coming anymore than Daredevil himself did was, as Anton Chigurh once put it regarding a chit-chat under similar circumstances, “the nature of this conversation.” In his first two episodes, the Punisher was a figure of almost mute menace—a man in black in the grand tradition of the Terminator or the Grim Reaper, his actions speaking louder and more lethally than his few words. When he chained Matt to a chimney to confront him about their differing tactics, I expected more of the strong, silent–type same. Instead, their exchange had the vibe of an argument between friends in a bar an hour before closing. Amid more overlapping crosstalk than the show has ever staged dialogue with, the two traded insults, wisecracks, dimestore psychoanalysis, angry and sloppy self-defenses, and the occasional bit of heartfelt emotion. We’ve never heard Matt sound this much like a Noo Yawker, before, that’s for sure, playing off their shared ethnic-Catholic NYC heritage by mocking Frank’s sob story with a sarcastic “well, boo-hoo” and rhetorically taunting him by asking “You never think, for one second, ‘Shit, I just killed a human being?’”

Meanwhile, the Punisher, who in a clever bit of characterization consumes coffee at roughly the same rate as ammunition, is jittery, angry, accusatory, and defensive. He dismisses Daredevil’s mask as a way to dodge personal responsibility for his actions: “Soldiers, we don’t wear masks. We don’t get that privilege.” He spews tough-guy platitudes, cribbed (by the writers, if not by Frank) from popular tough-guy media sources, from “I think you’re a half-measure” (see also Mike Ehrmantraut in Breaking Bad) to “You know you’re one bad day away from being me” (cf. the Joker in Alan Moore & Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke) to “this world, it needs men that will make the hard call” (customers who bought this also enjoyed Rust Cohle saying “the world needs bad men — we keep the other bad men from the door” in True Detective); the entire “kill me or I kill someone else” rooftop bit is lifted wholesale from Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s black-comedy run on the character’s comic book series.

Despite all this, Frank assures Daredevil, using a nickname that makes it sound like he’s talking to his buddy Murph down at the pub, “I’m not a bad guy, Red.” This is a very human inhuman monster we’re talking about here, as evidenced elsewhere by his ability to exert enough macho Marine charm on an inquisitive building super to win the guy over rather than scare him away. A fan of the likes of the Hound, Hanzee Dent, and Richard Harrow such as myself might expect to be disappointed by this turn of events, but I find myself fond of this interpretation of Frank as a man whose conscience had to be beaten down rather than one that was cauterized out.

But the most compelling thing about their rooftop heart-to-heart is what doesn’t get said. As many critics have noted, their argument centers on the relative lethality of their respective brands of vigilante justice: The Punisher kills, Daredevil doesn’t. Anywhere outside a superhero story, this is a pretty thin reed on which to hang a system of morality, since Daredevil routinely beats the living shit out of people, and tortures someone for information at least as often as Sarah Koenig posts new episodes of Serial Season Two. No matter how much Matt waxes eloquent about hope and redemption, forces that Frank snuffs out when he takes life, isn’t this a ridiculous, hair-splitting argument to have with a masked man who hurts people in the name of helping people?

Well, yes, it is — and just as it always has, the show knows this. “I don’t do this to hurt people,” Matt tells Frank, who responds with skepticism: “Yeah, so what is that, just a job perk?” “I don’t kill anyone.” “Is that why you think you’re better than me?” Frank presses. “No.” “Is that why you think you’re a big hero?” “It doesn’t matter what I think or what I am,” Matt insists “Is that a fact?” When pushed on the question of whether beating people is heroic, Matt simply refuses to answer. It’s just like when instead of telling Wilson Fisk that yes, one man really could change the system, he simply knocked the dude out. Daredevil the show knows that Daredevil the heroic figure is a mess of contradictions and impossibilities, and to its credit it never shies away from this, nor offers a half-assed explanation or excuse. It goes out of its way to point this out repeatedly, both in dialogue scenes like this one, and in its use of violence, which is uniformly ugly rather than antiseptically thrilling. Like Game of Thrones, it brings to the audience’s attention the brutality that genre pieces of its ilk usually would like you to forget, and like Game of Thrones it gets lambasted under the assumption that depiction equals exploitation, if not endorsement. But it’s the only superhero show I can think of that asks us to think about what happens when people hit people to stop them hitting back.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island. He also recaps Showtime’s The Affair and HBO’s The Leftovers for Decider.